Prophecy Over Your Children

“When I dropped out of Harvard, my parents were celebrating! They were so excited for me to be working on a start-up out of my professor’s basement.” One of the things that struck me most in our fascinating conversation with Amy Yin, the Founder and CEO of OfficeTogether, was how her parents planted bold career aspirations from a very young age.

Amy explained, “My parents are from China, and I’m the firstborn in America. Most parents like mine want their child to become a doctor. But my parents often said, ‘We didn’t raise you to be an employee. We raised you to be a CEO.’” So dropping out of Harvard was a step towards the fulfillment of their prophecy, in her parents’ minds.

That quote has been stuck in the back of my head ever since we spoke with Amy, and what dislodged it was an unexpected glimpse into the atmosphere of Nobel-Prize winner Richard Feynman’s home growing up:

As James Gleick describes in his fantastic biography, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Feynman’s father, “Melville announced in advance that he would be a scientist… Richard's father undertook to help his prophecy along. Before the baby was out of his high chair, he brought home some blue and white floor tiles and laid them out in patterns, blue-white-blue-white or blue-white-white-blue-white-white, trying to coax the baby to recognize visual rhythms, the shadow of mathematics…

“His father declared — something he had heard — that electrochemistry was an important new field, and Richard tried in vain to figure out what electrochemistry was: he made piles of dry chemicals and set live wires in them. A jury rigged motor rocked his baby sister's crib. When his parents came home late one night, they open the door to a sudden claim claim claim and Richard shout: ‘It works!’ They now had a burglar alarm. If his mother’s bridge partners asked how she could tolerate the noise, or the chemical smoke, or the not-so-invisible ink on the good linen hand towels, she said calmly that it was worth it. There were no second thoughts in the middle-class Jewish families of New York about the value of ambition on the children's behalf.”

It struck me that Amy’s parents weren’t much different than Feynman’s. Whereas the cultural value in the Feynman family was scientific exploration, the Yin family values were centered on opportunities afforded by entrepreneurship. But in both cases, it required parents not only plant bold dreams in their kids’ hearts, but also that they were willing to make the sacrifices necessary for those dreams to become a reality.

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